About This Blog

Development happens through jobs. They allow families to escape poverty, individuals to develop skills, and excluded groups such as women and youth to gain economic independence. This blog presents solutions that will lead to more, better and inclusive jobs brings by presenting ideas and perspectives from global thought leaders on the jobs challenge.

youth unemployment

Youth employment programs should place more emphasis on mentoring youth on how to self-assess their existing skills - including soft skills - and how to better signal these skills to employers. (Photo: Grant Ellis / World Bank Group)

Finding a good job is increasingly difficult – especially for young people. Globally, young people are up to four times more likely to be unemployed than adults. Furthermore, the lack of opportunity can have devastating consequences for their long-term employment outcomes. Youth often lack the skills and competencies that are in high demand from employers, but they also face information gaps about which relevant skills they should signal to prospective employers.

To better understand youth and skills trends in emerging markets, the Solutions for Youth Employment (S4YE) Coalition embarked on a research collaboration with LinkedIn to analyze demand and supply side data from 390,000 entry-level job postings and 6.4 million LinkedIn profiles of young people (aged 21-29) in four diverse middle-income countries. Using big data analytics, the recently released report The Skills Gap or Signaling Gap: Insights from LinkedIn in emerging markets of Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa brings the following three insights on what skills employers in those countries are looking for in youth hires.

Youth are at the heart of migration. Between 2010 and 2015, the estimated net inflow of young people of working age population was 14.8 million. (Photo: Dominic Chavez / World Bank)

Tomorrow is International Youth Day!

This year, we have reasons to celebrate. Globally, more and more young people are receiving an education and women are making some progress in key indicators like life expectancy and economic engagement outside the home. But there persist urgent reasons to double down on efforts to engage the global youth population in productive work:

For China, the minimum wage is a useful tool to reduce wage and income inequality, and in recent years, the minimum wage has risen rapidly in many provinces. We recently asked Shi Li (Professor of Economics, School of Economics and Business, Beijing Normal University) about the economic impact of the higher minimum wages. He cautions that enforcement was lax until 2009 and the results of the initial studies are inconsistent and sometimes contradictory.